Nightmares Have Meaning

In my nightmare, I was attending a religious ceremony. The congregation had dutifully attended, largely as a social event, and a point of pride—a kind of “I went to church today, did you?” The minister was similarly delivering a well-rehearsed, most likely regurgitated sermon with a superficial air of caring for his words. I imagine his theme came from the twelve-step program. He said we do what we can with our addictive behavior and accept what we cannot do right now. A short, dark immigrant man with his son, say seven or eight years old, approached the metal gate surrounding the speaker’s dais.

The man was prepared to ask for help when the minister drew a gun from his robes and shot the man, then his son, then himself. The parishioners arose in shock, jumping up and down, flinging their arms in the air, the women screaming. Someone sent for the police.

A dream you say. Worthless garbage. Ignore it. Oh no. Stop. Associate to your memory. What is the dream telling you? There are many messages coded here, some of them learned events recorded for their personal value, some your own concoction. All of them important.

Religion has been misused throughout the ages. The United States sent missionaries to the South American jungle to learn local native languages into which they translated the bible in order to convert the natives. Once herded into small groups living close together, the women in breast covering mumu’s and all susceptible to the mosquito bites and malaria. The institutions funding these missions had come to dig oil. The converted natives have surrendered their entitlement to the land.

Take seekers of the holy grail, surely a religious group that raped and pillaged their way across Europe. Take the current Indonesian police murdering people of the Rohinga group and forcing all to flee in order to keep their land. And Sung Su Chi, a finally freed winner of the Nobel Peace Prize ignores it. She has learned when not to speak.

Why does the minister shoot the undocumented immigrant and his son who seek his help? Why do we US citizens allow our government to treat them as criminals and lock them up?

The minister knows himself as two people, one a phony power, the other a helpless weakling. The cleric doles out pity rather than empathy to keep the goods of office. He feels hatred for the other weaklings among him, with whom he secretly puts himself. The monster seeking power kills them as a rejected self. Then the monster devoid of humanity kills his inadequate self as well.

I was only pulled out of my nightmare by the alarm clock ringing its soprano code. For how long had it been singing? This post is only a part of our own alarm clock, our early morning soprano song, a warning. For how long must it ring before we wake up?